by Lena Bourne
No wonder all those cars were parked where they were.
Brilliant!
Transport the girl here. Arrange her. Then call the fire department to cover your tracks.
In the distance, where the lane joins the road, a pair of forensic technicians are examining the wide lane, nearly invisible in their white jumpsuits. They’ll find nothing. But they’ll try as hard as they can.
From the corner of my eye, I catch a glint in the trees opposite the lane.
Did he fuck up?
Maybe he couldn’t resist watching us as we struggled to find at least one, single tiny shred of evidence that he didn’t intend us to find.
I run down the stairs, not even hearing the creaking. Or Schmitt’s yells for me to stop as I wade through knee-high soft snow towards where I saw the glint. I’m panting by the time I reach the first line of trees where something glimmered for the split second it took for me to notice it, but despite it, I’m willing to keep running until I catch the bastard watching us.
I most likely only have my training and experience to thank for keeping a tiny window of clarity open amid my blind hatred. I notice it a split second before I trample right into it.
A ring of stuffed—rabbits, foxes, birds, even a doe, even a wolf are arranged in a circle, their glassy, dead eyes all staring up at the room where Snow White lies dead.
Eerily familiar. One more page from our collective childhood gone, destroyed, crumpled, and discarded. If I ever have a daughter—not likely at my age, but still—how am I ever going to read to her the story of Snow White having seen this? How will anyone?
These killings reach beyond the horror of ritualistic snuffing out of young lives into the collective consciousness of goodness and happiness of everyone it touches. And it touches everyone. Hits where it hurts the most. I sound like Eva in one of her articles, but she’s not wrong.
How can we catch a man who enjoys his kills this much?
How do we catch a man who plans every little thing down to what clues we’re allowed to find?
I’m on the verge of puking by the time Schmitt reaches me. For the first time in my twelve-year career, during which I’ve seen all manner of gruesome and horrific, I’m ready to quit if I have to look at another dead fairytale princess.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Schmitt pants and wheezes at me, but his curt tone loses its bite before he gets to the end.
His dark eyes are wide, reflecting the meticulously arranged forest creatures, all as dead as the girl in the cabin.
“I thought I saw someone watching from the trees,” I say. “But it was just this.”
I turn my back on him and the house. Somehow it’s easier looking at the source of his shock than the weirdness that caused it.
The snow the animals are arranged in is barely disturbed, and no human tracks are leading to it as far as I can see. Just tiny paw prints. The dedication and planning that took. Sick doesn’t even begin to describe it.
“She talked to animals or something,” Schmitt says distractedly. “Snow White, I mean. In the story.”
I shrug my shoulders. “I think so.”
Actually, I know so. But I’m not willing to go any further down this sick rabbit hole this man dug for us.
Schmitt calls for the crime techs waving them over.
“There’s something by the road they want you to see,” he says.
I look out over the clearing, at the cabin, the trees, the white-clad tech walking this way, the curtained window of the room where the girl is sleeping forever. And shake my head.
“The only reason I’m here is that it’s my day off,” I say. “The official ruling of the Criminal Investigations Department of the US Military is that these murders are not in any way connected to any member of the US Armed Forces. They’ve ordered me to stay out of the investigation.”
Schmitt’s wide eyes are now fixed on mine. “What?” he manages to ask after a few false starts.
“Karl,” I say, using his first name since the situation seems to demand it. “I want to catch this guy as much as you do. But until there’s new evidence warranting my participation, my hands are tied.”
“You could’ve said so before,” he says, stepping aside to give the crime techs room to work.
“I should’ve,” I say and start walking back towards the cabin. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
But I do know.
I want to catch this guy.
I want to stop this guy.
Whoever he is.
So when I got Schmitt’s call this morning I ignored the fact that my hands are actually completely tied and I don’t have leave to be part of the investigation anymore. But in the cold light of dawn, in this clearing that might see light but won’t see the sun for months yet, that fact is hard to ignore. Impossible, actually.
“I’ll ask Hans to drive me back,” I say to Schmitt once we reach the start of the path we walked here on. “It’s better for the investigation if everyone agrees I was never here.”
My phone is buzzing in my pocket. Hopefully, it’s Eva, but it’s probably not. I’d rather not answer it.
4
Eva
After Mark left, I lay in bed watching the sky turn whiter and whiter. We’d have no sun today, just a white, diffused type of light, before it’ll turn dark much too soon. But what else is new this time of year?
My phones stayed quiet. No beeping to tell me of a fresh development, no news breaking. Whatever Mark went to see at dawn has not become public knowledge yet. But I’m sure it will soon. News travels fast, even in a city of three and a half million. Especially news of a serial killer.
If this was any other case, any other story, I’d be up and making phone calls by now. But as soon as the door closed behind him this morning, I realized that I was glad this story was over. Only it clearly wasn’t. We were all fools to think it would be. I’m sure of that now, and I don’t want to be.
“I’m coming home now,” he told me when I called him around ten, drinking my first cup of coffee of the day, still wearing just the scratchy cardigan.
I showered and washed my hair, dressed, and did my makeup before he arrived. I’m the one who’s playing what we have as a run-of-the-mill new relationship, as though he was the guy bringing me stuffed toys and flowers and kissing and hugging me awkwardly with no connection to me, just to the idea of me. I’ve dated plenty of guys like that. More and more as I got older. I’m the one unable to truly accept that I might have finally found the one man that I can be truly myself with. The one I can be alone with. Because we’re the same that way too. We’re both lone wolves, yet somehow we clicked. Maybe it’s just because we’re actually from the same country—Slovenia—even though he was born in the US and I’ve been living abroad on and off since I was twelve years old. When conversing, we speak in a combination of Slovenian, English, and even German. His Slovenian is rusty, but it’s great talking to someone in my native language. Most of my family is scattered all over the world too, my sister in Spain, my brother in New York City, and my parents currently living the easy life of retirement by the sea at their country house in Croatia. I don’t speak to any of them as much as I should. I was twelve when my family moved first to NYC and then London because of my father’s job. In three years, I’ll have spent a quarter of a century away from my home country. Sometimes I don’t even entirely consider it that anymore. I moved to Berlin almost six years ago now, because it’s such a culture-friendly, laid-back, diverse, artistic—bohemian, actually—city. It reminds me of NYC in a lot of ways, but the way that city used to be before overzealous gentrification stole its soul. I’m afraid gentrification is already doing the same here, but I still love living here.
“Was it bad?” I asked as he walked up the stairs, no smile or desire in his eyes this time. Only the happiness of being home, which I’m not sure I’m not just imagining.
He shrugged, gave me a quick hug and quicker kiss on the cheek, and went to the living room
.
It’s been hours and I still haven’t been able to get him to talk beyond answering my thinly veiled probing questions with short, non-answers.
I took my laptop to the kitchen to do some work because I was getting angry at his silence and I didn’t want to be. It’s just the way he is, it has nothing to do with me. He just needs time to think, and sometimes that means he doesn’t talk. It’s not personal. It’s nothing to do with me. It doesn’t mean we’re not well-suited. After a while of repeating that to myself, I calmed down.
I’m still getting no messages, no alerts that a new body’s been found by the time I can’t ignore my hunger anymore. It’s two and the bustling outside my window—cars honking, sirens blaring, people shouting—is reaching that midday crescendo as it does every day about this time, especially in winter. It’s like the last burst of life before night descends and everything quiets down again. The wind today must be vicious, since every so often a gust hits my single-pane windows, making them rattle and chime.
“How about I make us some lunch?” I say, leaning in the arched doorway from the kitchen to the living room. This apartment only has arched doorways, no doors, except the one to the bathroom. I like the spacious openness, but not the cold that’s impossible to shut out in winter.
He’s been sitting on the sofa, looking out the large windows at nothing in particular, since all he can see there is the grey wall of a socialist-era office-building with windows so small the occupants must stand right next to the windows to be seen. More than half of the offices in the building are unused, and most have broken blinds drawn day and night.
He turns to me and grins. “How about we order in?”
It’s one of the two answers I expected and I grin too, shrugging my shoulders. I would’ve preferred the other possible answer, the one where he says he’ll cook. He’s good at cooking, and I’m not. At all. The only three things I can reliably make from scratch are scrambled eggs, spaghetti Pomodoro and potato salad. Though I’m also very good at heating pre-prepared, frozen dishes in the microwave. But I’ve been learning. By watching him cook, mostly. He enjoys cooking and he’s really good at it. So my freezer is currently stocked with chicken as well as fish sticks. A step in the right direction, I thought, when I picked up the packet of meat in preparation for his arrival back from Kosovo.
“That works too,” I say and stride over to the cabinet by the front door where I keep my stack of takeout menus. If there was such a thing as a professional takeout orderer, I’m it. I even keep notes on which dish is best where.
“Chinese?” I ask. “Or maybe Greek?”
“Your choice,” he says, and I decide to just take him at his word. Although a part of me is bristling at him being so damn disinterested in everything today. But it’s just how he is. He’s distracted. Sometimes, when I’m deep in a story, I barely remember to return his calls or string more than three words together when I do. Story time, he calls it and understands.
“Greek it is,” I announce. We pore over the menus, and he’s not as disinterested in what he wants to eat as he was about what to eat.
“So, you ready to talk now?” I ask as I sit down next to him on the sofa after calling in the order. A question like that will always sound edgy and confrontational, I tell myself as he looks at me sharply, it’s just the nature of it.
“You haven’t heard yet?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Nope, not a peep.”
He nods thoughtfully, lacing his fingers together in his lap and leaning forward.
“I guess Schmitt is keeping a tight lid on this one,” he says. “Good. Gives him more time to work in peace.”
“Did you advise him to do that?” I ask. After they found the second body, the press was alerted just a couple of hours afterward, in what Mark called a panicked, headless chicken attempt at getting leads from the public, that probably made things worse rather than better.
He shakes his head and looks down at his hands. “I rushed there to see when I shouldn’t have, but then I managed to remove myself before I made the mess worse. I’m not part of the investigation anymore.”
“Not even now that he’s struck again?” I ask. “I assume it was the same. Or similar, I mean.”
He nods. “Yes. Meticulous attention to detail, every little piece in its proper place. Bled from jugular and the wrists, the cut super-glued together with military precision.”
“So all the same reasons why everyone thought it’s connected with the US Military again,” I muse.
“It’s Snow White,” he says after a slight pause, adding, “You’ll find out soon enough,” speaking more to himself than to me.
“And she’s posed as the American cartoon version, as all the others were,” he says. “By tomorrow all the papers and bloggers will be screaming it’s an American behind this. But I doubt Thompson will let me work on it despite that. He’ll just say we can weather some bad press easier if a US Military Special Investigator isn’t involved in the investigation. I’ve been sitting here, trying to figure out a way to convince him he’s wrong, but I can’t think of anything.”
A part of the reasoning there is that if a German was perpetrating these killings, he would have plenty of German fairytales to choose from, so why is he staging the American versions? Because he’s American, of course.
Thompson is Mark’s boss at CID and from what he always said, a very reasonable man.
“He might change his mind now,” I offer. “I mean, he took you off the case when he thought the murders had stopped.”
“The order to stay away came from much higher up. As long as the US Military is investigating, it looks like we’re tacitly accepting the blame. As some of your press friends have been so eager to keep pointing out,” he says.
“Not me—” I interject.
He turns to me and smiles. “No, not you. And you can’t print any of what I just told you either. Especially not the superglue thing.”
“I know, and I’m not going to.” I have to bite my lip to stop the indignation from welling up. The superglued cuts—the one clearest connection to the Military since that’s how they triage wounds on battlefields—is something he told me awhile ago and I kept my word, I never printed it anywhere. But I’m not about to start an argument with him when I just got him talking again.
He flashes me a weary look from the corner of his eye but then focuses them on the jewel of communist architecture across the street from my apartment. Or maybe he’s looking at the flat land beyond it. So full of possibility, I always thought. So full of nothingness, he seems to be thinking.
“What none of them understand is that I need to be on this case,” he says. “None of the cases I’ve worked on before this one, and there’s been a lot of them, ever got under my skin the way this one has.”
He looks at me, and in his eyes a mixture of shame, regret, and well-hidden wild panic. I wrap my palm around his interlaced hands and use the other to caress his cheek. He doesn’t shy away from what a lot of other men would construe as pity. It’s caring. It’s compassion. I don’t feel sorry for him.
“I understand, Mark,” I whisper. “But what the hell else are you going to do? Orders are orders, right?”
I wish I had better advice to give him. But from what he told me, he could be facing a discharge from the military if he doesn’t step away from this case, and with everything else this Fairytale Killer has already taken, I don’t want him to destroy Mark’s career too.
He grins and narrows his eyes in ironic acceptance. “Yeah. Orders.”
The doorbell rings just then, and while I’m waiting for the delivery guy by the door, Mark gets a phone call.
I didn’t hear his side of the conversation, but he’s paler than he had been all morning, his face hard like it was carved from ice when I reenter the living room carrying the plastic bags with the food.
“I have to go into the office,” he tells me.
I could ask why, but he wouldn’t tell me. His silent mode is
back on.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers as he kisses my cheek by the door, already wearing his coat and shoes.
“It’s all right,” I tell him. “Call me when you can.”
He nods and leaves and I know he will. We’ve been together for six months—well, more like four, since he’s been away working on cases around Europe for two of them—and there’s no logical reason why I’m so sure of him, but I am.
5
Mark
The US military base, which also houses the CID is a huge, sprawling complex just outside Berlin city limits. It’s seen its share of history over the years, but has, lately, become a bustling, vibrant sort of place as the army has started working on community outreach more and more. The severe, utilitarian narrow building that houses the central command, CID as well as several other departments, looms large over the smaller buildings housing the barracks, garages, mess halls, cinema, rec centers, and other necessary parts to a military base. This base, or Kasarne, as it’s called in German, was fully equipped when we took it over decades ago, so it has that air of permanence and history—home, even—that so many other US Military bases, erected for the sole purpose of serving as such, do not.
I took a taxi from the city center but had the driver drop me off before we reached the gate in the tall concrete wall, that still has the metal rods that were used to attach vicious barbed wire to when this complex was a much more severe place. No barbed wire remains, and most of the rods are rusted nearly all the way through. One day they’ll have to be removed too, but that lengthy and time-consuming project hasn’t yet floated to the top of any to-do list.
I walked past the check-point and along the neatly paved path lined with two small groves of leafless trees that make the approach to the high command building seem like you’re just visiting any old, run-of-the-mill place. The walls are still white for the most part, dotted with narrow, tiny, identical windows. One hundred of them, spanning four floors. I counted. The red double doors directly in the center of the building are the only entrance from this side and I’d much rather be standing outside marveling at the simplicity of the design of this building than going in to face anything but a simple summons.